"Not to-night. A--a little flutter of authority. You leave next week? I shall not, perhaps, take the trouble to prevent your seeing Helen. I shall take the trouble to see that nothing comes of it. My dear boy, I'm extremely sorry. I don't like you. Your invitation to candor is irresistible." Morgan laughed shortly, turned, and went into the hall. Thaddeus followed. "Really, it's raining. Let me lend you--but a soldier, of course--what a blessing is youth! Exit!"--to the now closed outer door--"exit the primitive." And so spring came to an end, with a warm rain murmuring on the roofs all night, soaking down the roots of the maples, driving part of the Third Regiment to sleep in the grand-stands. As in sleeping Hamilton no one knew another's dream, so almost as little by lamp-light or at dawn did any watcher truly imagine another's thought. Who shall escape the dungeon of himself? The policeman on the corner of Shannon Street and Philip's road, when Morgan rushed by him, sympathized with an apparent hurry to get out of the comfortless rain. Thaddeus, before his sea-coal fire, plotted such happy paths for Helen to walk in as an enlightened egoism showed would be best for Thaddeus. Helen let the rain drive in her face, and thought that, "if people never meet again, never will be a long, long time." Gard stood in the middle of his study, looked around him, whistled "The Campbells Are Coming," and called it clearing up. Books, music, piano, chairs, and memories of meditations--he thought he did not care much what became of them. There was a new time coming, and time it came. "This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips. We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns." "The Campbells are coming--trala! trala!" Mrs. Mavering drew the rope of her long black hair over her shoulder, smoothed it on her knee, and thought of the terms "commission" and "estates in happiness." The braid was thick and glossy. It seemed hard if her own play were quite ended and story told. What, nothing more! Restlessness must come from overbrooding, or the new stir of the times. A woman's story ended too soon. What a melancholy noise the rain made! Who shall escape the dungeon of himself, or look from its clouded windows through the clouded windows even of that one which lies nearest, where another prisoner strains to see? Chapter XI The Whirlpool.--Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women. The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory desolation.